Development supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude in cooperation with MFG Baden-Württemberg, Goethe-Institut Villa KamogawaProduction funded by The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the MediaPost-production supported by Atelier 105 / Light Cone

A Japanese philosopher writes a letter to a famous German colleague. He asks the German to advise the Japanese people how to deal with the permeation of modern life by technology. More than 50 years later, the same issues are being discussed among academics and aspiring engineers. It is hard to grasp how humans and technology continue to coexist. Resorting to biographical trivia, mythological histories and the recounting of dreams is not helping them to see these issues any clearer. In the grainy images of the film, landscapes from an uncertain time appear, occasionally flooded by water and a cacophony of brass players. The uncontrollable finds its ways into a world that tries to minimise risks and thus creates new dangers.

Funded by The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the German Federal Film Boardwith the kind support of Bhima Manik and the Charak Sanyasis of Dom Pada and Ram Bagan, Kolkata, India; The Anath Nath Deb Trust Estate; The Anath Nath Deb Bazar Committee

A theorem from physics that describes apparent forces in circular motion when observed from an external frame of reference lends its name to a film by Philip Widmann: Fictitious Force is a cinematic exchange on the impossibility of sharing experiences, in black and white and grey.We see a man preparing to perform in front of a large crowd. Several features signify that this performance is part of a ritual, that the location of events is in an exotic country with a different writing system and different conventions of clothing. Shot in 2013 during a festival of devotees of Shiva by a local crew in Kolkata/India, and in a language that the director neither speaks nor understands, the film relies on the visual and leaves us puzzled. Fragmented dialogues in Bengali and English appear as type, interrupting the course of events, and negotiating the dilemma of ethnography and – perhaps – of spectatorship itself in mundanely poetic terms. The distance between observer and observed, between self and other can be diminished or negated but eventually cannot be overcome. Like previous works of Widmann’s, Fictitious Force implicitly deals with questions of representation and physicality, informed by an anthropological interest that claims no academic foundation. - www.schloss-post.com

A woman‘s voice and a man‘s voice speaking in unison: »A woman called Monika, and a man called Hans. Hans documents in writing that Monika has threatened him - her boss, employer and lover - with the withdrawal of her sexual favors if his wife doesn‘t apologize to her.«The contents of a black briefcase lead us into a superficially well-ordered life in West Germany in 1970, in a city that can be seen as representative of the entire country. In this briefcase: the meticulous documentation of an affair between the small business owner Hans and his secretary Monika. A detailed protocol of their sexual activities leaves a trail through the field of infinite possibilities and finite probabilities of leading a different life under the same circumstances.

Monika and Hans have a relationship, and Hans considers this relationship worthy of documentation. He creates a collection in a black briefcase. This collection is his form of a coherent narrative, a factual report. Written entries are supplemented and seemingly verified by receipts, calendar pages, photographs and other artifacts. Szenario follows the chronology of the entries, whose plot is as banal as it is absurd. And because the contents of the briefcase betray more about Hans, the writer, than about Monika, the one written about, the question quickly arises: Who is this Monika? Or rather, who might she have been?The film projects a second image onto the one created by Hans, and adds another scenario to his factual report. A concatenation of the probable life situation of a woman named Monika, who could be any woman, with the possibilities of leading a completely different life under the same circumstances. The circumstances: regional, biological, social and individual determinants, which outline the setting and the character. A West German city named Cologne, age and gender, mental and physical health, the character‘s own horizon.Neither picture is complete nor congruent. Doubts arise. The film is composed of a chain of questions about the identity of numbers, words, images and sounds - and the people and places they help describe. Is what is heard identical to what is seen? Is the photo identical to the image in the film? The written to the spoken? The spoken to the thought?

A/M Spring Version

Produced by Goethe-Institut Athens as part of Hand Over Cinema, a workshop organized by LabA in cooperation with LaborBerlin e.V.

An afternoon in Athens, September 2011, the sun is low. A film, more than 50 years old. There is always something being transported, even if the boxes may turn out to be empty. Goods, means and actors tell stories: metaforai. A/M Spring Version combines documentary footage shot in Athens shortly before sunset, which were hand-processed and edited on the same evening, with a re-photographed and animated travel film from the 1950s. It is a take on an excerpt from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. The passage reads: »In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaforai. To go to work or come home, one takes a metaphor – a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organise places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.«

Produced by Philip Widmann in co-production with Karsten Krause and in cooperation with Hamburg University of Fine Arts

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and Freundeskreis der HfbK Hamburg e.V.

Gerti Gerbert was photographed by her husband Eugen over a period spanning more than forty years. Besides the obligatory family photographs, from their wedding day until his death Eugen took countless pictures of Gerti: in her underwear, in homemade summer frocks, or completely naked; on the beach, in the woods, in the car, or on the floor at home.Using the Gerberts’ picture archive, interviews with Gerti, and Eugen’s notes, the film looks at what remains of life and love at the end.

A man, presumably of Vietnamese origin, travels Europe.Shortly after, American troops enter the ground war in Vietnam.

The opening moments of the film feature a shot of Paris from an ascending lift on the Eiffel Tower. The subject of the film, a Vietnamese man always neatly dressed in a dark suit and tie, is introduced and shown walking around an observation level on the tower. What initially appears to be a simple, vintage home movie quickly begins to invite multiple readings by the viewer and to suggest layer upon layer of additional meanings. We follow the man as he appears before many of Europe’s most famous landmarks: the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; London’s Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Piccadilly Circus; the Acropolis in Athens.Who is this man? Who is holding the camera? Who is the man in tweed, watching the Vietnamese man cross a rainy street in Paris? He looks into the camera, and then quickly turns his back, apparently to avoid detection. Are we in the middle of a Graham Greene spy story? Widmann hints at his intentions in the film’s conclusion, when we see the man, packed and bound for Saigon as indicated by his Air France luggage tag. He is met by a large gathering — friends, family? — upon his return. It is not until the film’s brief epilogue, however, when all of what we have witnessed fully resonates.

Destination Finale similarly complicates the relation between the viewer and what is being seen. The film recuts found home movie footage of a European holiday that features a Vietnamese man who poses, reluctantly it seems, in front of the Eiffel Tower, Piccadilly Circus and the Acropolis.The footage was found in 2005 in Saigon and Widmann added sound effects, including rain, the chiming of Big Ben and the sound of marching, but no voiceover to guide the footage that’s being seen. Presumably it’s just as perplexing for him: who is this man that we’re seeing and who is filming him? More importantly, whose film is this?Destination Finale raises some of the same questions that were treated rather dubiously in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), but Widmann’s artifact is ever more elusive, even ghostly. At the end of the film, Widmann notes the coincidence of the dates between the footage, estimated between late 1964 and early 1965, and the deployment of US troops to Vietnam in March of 1965, a fact that further complicates the way in which these images might be read. Is this man, in his seeming discomfort, already aware of what’s to come? Or does this slight hint of a narrative only expose the fact that he is ultimately unknowable?